


May Your Heart Be Your Guiding Key

by lawyerdonut



Category: Kingdom Hearts, Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Game: Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep, Gen, Hollow Bastion | Radiant Garden, funky human experimentation, seriously I Do Not Care what canon says about this, taking canon and stomping all over it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24800464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lawyerdonut/pseuds/lawyerdonut
Summary: A telling of how Subject X escaped Radiant Garden
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	May Your Heart Be Your Guiding Key

I don’t know what day it is. 

I don’t remember my name.

I can’t think.

They come at all hours of the day. To experiment on me. 

The one that always takes me, he wears an eyepatch. It’s the only thing I can see in the darkness of my cell, before he blindfolds me. It’s welcomed at this point, as it traps a small amount of heat against my skin. A stark contrast to the freezing temperatures.

I don’t really like to think about what they do once they strap me down to that chair, but I can’t seem to keep my mind off it.

The one that ties me down has the toughest hands. It’s always the same one, I’m sure. He smells like dirt and mineral oil, and it’s suffocating when he’s standing right over me. Even though the tough ones wear gloves, I can almost feel the calluses through them.

Their voices have started to blend together. Except for one. It’s older, a man’s. I’ve haven’t heard him in the same room as me for a while, but his was always the softest when he spoke. 

The voice I’ve learned to fear is cold and cruel. It reprimands me when I struggle, and it always seems dissatisfied with my answers to its questions. All the voices ask the same things. They ask what my home was like.

When I don’t respond, I am met with a sharp pain in my chest. I have no doubt that they’ll keep me here until I remember, or until they kill me. Whichever comes first, I suppose.

Once, when the eyepatched man was taking me to the others, I heard cries from the cells we passed. There were names, voices whispering names. The man told them to shut up, I remember. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t seem to recall what those names were.

Wait. I can hear footsteps. The man, he’s here. It must be my time, then. Oh, I don’t know if I can stand. My bones ache from sleeping on this concrete floor for so long, and it’s as if it sapped my life force along with my body heat.

“Subject X.” The bars whirr open. I see that eyepatch. “Get up.”

He grabs me by my arm, but he doesn’t harshly lift me like he has before.

“Come on. You’re getting out of here.” His voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it before. “Kid. Get up. I don’t have a lot of time before they come back.”

“You-” I manage to croak out, coughing a little bit at how hoarse my voice is. “You’re saving me?”

“Not if you don’t stand up. Let’s go.” He grabs onto my other arm and hauls me to my feet. I nearly collapse onto the floor, but his arms are steady.

“I can’t walk,” I breathe, my head spinning.

“You won’t have to go far. Lean on me.” He throws one of my arms over his shoulder, bearing most of my weight. I realize that he smells familiar. If I knew what my home smelled like, I think he would smell like it.

He walks me through the castle, down hallways that seem to go on forever. My eyes droop closed; I almost fell asleep to the rhythmic steps we were taking. Just as I almost tripped, the man stopped.

“Go through there.”

I opened my eyes to see that I was now in a dimly lit room, faced with an enormous dark portal looming on the wall in front of me. 

“Don’t be scared.” He took my arm off his shoulder and looked me in my eyes. His eye was golden and glinted in the candlelight, as if King Midas himself had brushed his iris. “That’ll take you out of here. No more scary experiments.”

“Where does it lead?”

“You’ll find out. When you get there, don’t tell anyone what happened here. They’ll kill me. Got it, kiddo?” He pats me on the shoulder and pushes me toward the portal. 

What if he’s lying? What if what’s on the other side will kill me?

Couldn’t be worse than staying here.

I step gently into the portal, glancing back at the man that saved me. I don’t know why, but I feel like I should remember him. In case I see him again. I turn back to him, seeing a lopsided smile paint his face.

“May your heart be your guiding key.”


End file.
